We’re going to try something new here: sponsorships. We hope this experiment will be effective for you and our sponsors. Send us your feedback.

We would like to welcome our first sponsor, Charles River Ventures. And I would like to thank George Zachary from CRV for working with me to get this done. You’ll find the sponsorship near the top right of our website. It looks like this:

You’ll also see occasional messages from our sponsors in our blog and Twitter feeds.

If sponsorships are useful to our readers, they’ll be useful to our sponsors. And if they’re not useful to you, they won’t be useful to our sponsors. Let us know what you think as this experiment progresses.

Here’s a message from CRV that describes what they do and how they do it:

“CRV’s approach to investing is simple: we seek out visionary entrepreneurs, and give them the support they need to build great companies from the ground up. It’s our job to enable startups. Not second-guess them.

“Our initial investment can be as small as $100,000, or as large as $5 million. The bulk of our investments have been to companies with fewer than 10 employees—many have as few as 2 or 3. We don’t require a complete management team, since we can often help in bringing the right talent to the mix.

“Unlike many venture firms, we don’t lurk on the sidelines waiting for a strong lead investor to step up. When we believe in a project, we want to be the lead investor.

“The best way to get our attention is not with a 100-page business plan. A concise executive summary, an expense budget for the first two years, the revenue model, and a PowerPoint presentation are the materials we’re interested in seeing. It helps if one of our portfolio companies, or a member of our contact network recommends you.

What I love about your site is the irreverent, candid how-tos. Sponsorships can work, but this particular message doesn’t (it’s just cut and paste from their website). In my view, it’s risky when sponsorship and editorial are co-mingled…better to separate them somehow so you don’t become beholden to and a shill for a particular interest.

There doesn’t seem to be any benefit for the users here. Just looks like a normal ad you would see on another site, and being that most users here don’t even see ads consciously on sites, I don’t see how this will work